


Like a Puzzle

by Meredydd



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/F, F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2016-12-27
Packaged: 2018-09-12 13:51:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9074692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meredydd/pseuds/Meredydd
Summary: Molly couldn’t understand the point, really. The movies were so silly, with manufactured crises over which one to pick, who was better. Can’t she just have both? Why does one have to be better? Can’t she have two different lovers, and they fit the bits of her that are missing and they all make a puzzle together?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thecount](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecount/gifts).



Some time between weighing Mrs. Liberman’s lungs and removing her liver to be measured, Molly was found out. She heard the throat-clearing from the doorway of the autopsy bay and frowned. “Didn’t you see the sign on the door?” she said, not looking up from the careful separation of organ from body. “Unless you’ve just gone toes up or you’re assisting me, you can’t be in here.”

“I think you’ll find that I can.”

“Oh! Doctor Fallon!” Molly nearly fumbled Mrs. Liberman’s liver in her haste to move it to the scale and stammer an apology to her direct supervisor. “I—I think you were one of the lads from records, come down on a dare again!”

“Quite.” Doctor Fallon, arms folded around his whippet-thin middle, stalked towards her table, eyes narrowed on Mrs. Liberman’s open chest cavity. “Are you still working on this one, Hooper? The chart outside shows she was brought in last night and was scheduled for examination this morning. It’s now,” he made a show of checking his watch, “gone half-three. Why is her autopsy taking so long, Doctor Hooper?” He emphasized her title in such a way that she knew she was about to be sacked. It was like a banshee wail, but sarcastic and with a Newcastle twinge. 

Still, she did her best not to show the sudden and intense fear bubbling away in her veins. She knew that her face was turning beetroot red and she was about to start shaking (she couldn’t help it—when she was nervous, she shook like a leaf), but she tipped her chin and said, “We had a backlog, Doctor Fallon. There was a multiple victim stabbing and we received the bodies since we were closest. It put us behind a few hours this morning, getting them properly recorded and stored.” That, she knew, was about ninety percent of the truth. The other ten percent, the part where she also had to chase Sherlock and John out of her office twice, before noon, and Mycroft had called from Spain and Greg hadn’t called at all… She inhaled slowly and met Doctor Fallon’s gaze. “I’m nearly done weighing her large organs now. I’ll be closing the incisions soon and sending the recordings to Rochelle for transcription.”

Doctor Fallon did not respond, his gaze fixed firmly somewhere in the region of Molly’s neck. “I’ve heard disturbing things about you, Doctor Hooper. Rumors, mostly to do with that weird chap that we keep running off. The one that faked his death a few years back. Quite the media circus, that.” He let his gaze drift over her face, searching, before he continued. “It’s long been thought he had help from someone here, or at least someone with medical knowledge and a skewed sense of loyalty to...” he trailed off. “Well, whatever he’s claiming to be this week, hm? What was it? Private investigator, consulting detective…” He smirked and met her eyes again. “It’s quite curious, how he was able to fake his demise to easily, and from our very hospital. Curious, how he was autopsied and pronounced dead, but is demonstrably right as rain. Well, as right as a creature like that could be, anyway.” He leaned across Mrs. Liberman’s body and dropped his voice to a bare hiss. “I can’t get the board to believe me, but I know you were involved, Doctor Hooper. And seeing you on Monday, with my own eyes, kissing that reptile brother of his, the one in the papers after the miraculous resurrection? The one who is allegedly a traffic minister’s flunky? I can do the math, Hooper. You’re dismissed. Formal paperwork will be messengered to your residence. Don’t darken the halls of this hospital again.” 

Molly’s jaw worked. _But what about my career? I love my job! What the Hell am I going to do? Please don’t sack me! Please!_ She bit down on the words threatening to spill out and only nodded once, curtly.

“That’s it? Not going to deny it, Hooper? I’m disappointed!”

“There’s… there’s one thing, sir.” She stepped away from the table, Mrs. Liberman still open. She itched to complete the autopsy but knew better than to try, not while Fallon was looming. She’d get Rochelle… She shook herself and looked back at Fallon, who was staring at her with a smug, vicious expression on his face. She took a deep breath and thought of Mycroft. “Your tie. It looks expensive.”

“It is. So?”

“Just thought you’d like to know it’s been dangling in Mrs. Liberman’s chest cavity for about a minute and a half now.” She smiled, stepped back again, and turned sharply on her heel, marching herself towards the bins and clean up station. Thinking of Greg, she snapped her gloves off and tossed them into the bin and set to scrubbing her hands whilst Doctor Fallon swore and cursed Mrs. Liberman, Molly, and whomever invented autopsies. She was able to leave without him speaking to her again. Quickly, she gathered her meager belongings from her desk and file cabinet before stopping back the changing room to get her personal items from her locker. It was not quite four yet. She’d have the flat to herself for hours. _Be brave till you get to the flat,_ she told herself. _Then you can snot all over yourself._

*** 

“It’s not your fault,” Greg was murmuring. 

Molly rolled over and reached out, only to find the bed empty. The room was dark and stuffy, her duvet pulled up to her neck. _Mycroft._ The gesture used to irritate her, the tucking her in, but it took Greg to point out to her that it was a show of caring from someone who could be erudite and witty, but was pants at personal communication. She sat up and shook off the covers, scrubbing at her eyes to rid them of sleep. There was still talking going on, just outside her door, and she strained to hear it.

“It might not be my fault,” Mycroft said softly, “but I am not entirely blameless. I’m the one who coerced her into helping him. I--”

“My, do you honestly think Molly would’ve said no to helping Sherlock? You remember how she was back then.” Greg sounded somewhere between annoyed and amused. Molly wanted to hide her face in her hands and pray for a meteor to hit the flat just then, wishing to the high heavens that everyone would just forget what a numpty she’d been over Sherlock Bloody Holmes. “I was there, the night of that stupid Christmas party,” Greg said, his voice dropping lower. Molly could barely hear him when he added, “Good God, that dress still does things to me, when I think about it.”

“I’m sure Molly would let you borrow it,” Mycroft remarked dryly. There was a soft thud, and a moment later, “Really, Gregory, was that called for?”

“It was. You’re trying to change the subject. I was there that night, before she went to the morgue. And I saw her. She’d have done it even without you asking.”

Mycroft’s sigh ghosted through the crack in the door and Molly wondered, for a flicker of a moment, if he knew she was awake. He always seemed to _know_ things, and two years of living together hadn’t given her any insight into _how_. She’d begun to just accept it as a magical power, really, and decided that it must have something to do with his umbrella. It was probably his horcrux, she’d told Greg. He promised not tell Mycroft she’d said it, but she caught him reading Philosopher’s Stone that same evening and knew Greg had crumbled under one of Mycroft’s intense stares. Still, she didn’t mind so much, the knowing. It was part of him, and if she couldn’t take it, she’d have left long ago, for someone less quietly passionate, less subtly kind and less likely to pretend he didn’t see cat hairs all over his bespoke trousers. She heard his voice, replying to Greg, but it was too soft, too low, for her to make out the words. She edged closer to the side of the ridiculous bed her lovers had both insisted upon and tried not to make any noise—they both had ears like lynxes. Greg’s reply to Mycroft was just as quiet and, after a long moment, she decided that they were either kissing, or had moved away from the door to make sure they didn’t awaken her. _Tough cookies, you two. You don’t grow up in a house with as many brothers as I did and not develop a keen ear for whispering male voices in the middle of the night!_ She quietly slipped from the bed and shoved her feet into her ratty old monkey-faced slippers, padding to the door and peeking out. They were in the living room, she realized, the soft glow of the television the only indication they were still in the flat, so quiet they’d become. Softly, she made her way out to them and, without speaking, moved to stand before them where they sat on the sofa, Greg’s bare feet in Mycroft’s lap as Mycroft rubbed the arches with his thumbs. Greg wordlessly paused the movie they’d been watching and raised his legs for Molly to sit. Once she was wedged comfortably between them, he stretched them across her once more, letting Mycroft resume his massage. An old movie was playing softly, captions engaged, and she felt a warmth spreading from her belly all the way to her chest. _They didn’t want to wake me… How did I deserve these two? What did I do, and if I do it again, will it make sure they don’t come to their senses and leave me one day?_

“Stop that,” Greg murmured, eyes closed as the Dashing Heroine raced after Lover Number One, hoping to get to the airport before his plane roared away to… Armenia? Argentina? Aruba? Somewhere with an A.

Molly looked between the two of them. Mycroft was looking straight ahead at the screen, still massaging Greg’s feet. “Oh. You mean me.”

“Yes, I mean you, my darling but transparent girl. You’ve got that frowny line between your eyes again. You’re thinking you fucked up and we’re going to leave.”

“I do wish you’d stop that,” Mycroft sighed. “Short of calling in every favor I am owed and creating several new ones to call in, which would necessitate quite a few international crises and possibly dog sitting, the marriage laws in this country do not allow for more than two people to join at the same time. If they were different, we’d all three be sitting here with rings on our fingers and you wouldn’t be making that face.”

Greg opened one eye. “See? The line there? Looks like a little frown.”

Molly felt her eyes go wide as both men turned their full attention to her. “I thought you called it a frowny line because I was frowning at the time,” was all she could manage under their twin stares of mutual interest. 

Greg chuckled and wrapped the fingers of his right hand through her left. “Molly, we’re sorry about what happened,” he said, his humor fading and voice growing serious and gruff. “I’ve been trying to think of something, anything I can do--”he paused, Mycroft’s subtle brow raise making him sigh. “Anything _we_ can do, and, short of a miracle, or something that would cost all of us our jobs, we just...can’t.”

“I don’t expect you to,” she said, squeezing Greg’s fingers and leaning her head on Mycroft’s shoulder. “We knew, back when we did this for Sherlock, that there was a chance we’d get caught. I just always thought it’d be a big, messy media event. Not… me getting sacked six years later.”

“I know,” Mycroft began slowly, a sure sign that what he was about to say would probably annoy her and he knew it, “I know of a few private hospitals which would beg for you to work for them, if you showed an interest,” he said. “They aren’t as busy as Bart’s but they aren’t,” he paused, bumping her gently with his shoulder, “some sort of, what’s that phrase you used? They aren’t some super secret shady government shit like on _Stranger Things._ ”

She rolled her eyes, but smiled. Mycroft had never been offended by her teasing about his work and, she found, actually enjoyed it, deadpanning some of the more cutting and dry remarks himself. _If you can’t laugh at the absurdity of it all, then you go mad,_ he told her. Greg had agreed, and the two of them had clinked glasses over the take away pizza Mycroft swore he’d never admit to eating, even under CIA torture. “Let me be miserable tonight. Tell me about it tomorrow, if you can.”

Greg squeezed her fingers again and pulled her hand close to kiss her knuckles. “You’re always so worried about us deciding you’re not worth it, you don’t realize that we’re worried about the same thing. Anyone else would’ve probably run screaming years ago, after all the secrecy and the faked death and… well. All of it.”

“That thing in the car park,” Mycroft muttered, slowing his ministrations to Greg’s feet.

“That was one time,” Greg protested, “and it was for my birthday. I said thank you,” he reminded them. “And I promised never to suggest it again.”

“There’s just some places a gearshift should never go,” Mycroft replied, his tone the lofty one he used to address lesser beings. Molly elbowed him in the ribs, and he did nothing so outre as smile, but his eyes did crinkle a bit, and his lips pressed into a thin line, dimpling at one corner. 

“You’re worth it,” Molly said, pretending interest in the movie still playing on the telly. “You both are, always. I… I didn’t think I’d ever be loved by one person, much less two. And now that we’re here, that we’re… we’re an us, I couldn’t imagine it not being us.” She frowned. “Does that make sense?”

“Perfectly,” Greg assured, closing his eyes once more. “Hey, do you still have that black dress you wore to the Christmas party? When you had the bit of tinsel in your hair?”

Mycroft groaned under his breath, something about libidos and fantasies, but Molly grinned. “Yes. And if you’re good, you can borrow it later.”

“Oi! You were awake?”

Mycroft didn’t bother hiding his smile then. “I told you.”

She let her head loll back against the sofa as the two of them bickered playfully over her, the movie spinning to it’s predictable conclusion. It was the old “one girl, two guys” trope, and Molly couldn’t understand the point, really. The movies were so silly, with manufactured crises over which one to pick, who was better. _Can’t she just have both? Why does one have to be better? Can’t she have two different lovers, and they fit the bits of her that are missing and they all make a puzzle together?_ She stretched out her free hand towards Mycroft and laced her fingers with his. He and Greg kept up their bickering, but it was slowing, growing quieter. Molly realized she was dozing again, and let herself fall. She was safe, she was complete, and tomorrow, she’d figure the rest of it out.


End file.
